UML: Unified Modeling Language. A cacophony of competing terms. A graphical method for writing code that is, astonishingly, even more cryptic than the code itself. A language in the same sense that hieroglyphics or Meso-American script are languages: difficult to write, impossible to translate, tedious to interpret. Skill requirement for any programming position on any project […]

T-SQL: A programming language consisting entirely of reserved words. A syntactic programming language where semantics are dependent on dataset. The classic practical joke where the con-artist convinces the programmer to think like a DBA. Programming is to T-SQLasMajor League Baseball is to Golf Team The collected members of a sports organization, from owners to managers […]

SAFe: Waterfall. It’s just like agile with not so much agile innit. Sandbox: A programmer’s machine, data, and code. The only place the release candidate works properly on the day it is released. Scaffold: Support structure for certain ropes, familiar to sheriffs and Clint Eastwood wild-west movie-goers. Application structures familiar to the condemned in new-west […]

RDBMS: Relational Database Management System. The pinnacle of engineering in computer systems whereby data structures are held in highest regard while meaning is held in lowest. A way of storing data most efficiently while obscuring meaning equally so. Proof that engineers can destroy in decades what took philosophers millennia to create; of genius without understanding […]

Qualified Dataset: A Dataset that has the additional benefit of an italicized caveat at the bottom of the data source. A dataset that has the credentials to data. Quality: adj. Denoting a superior nature. Better than most. Unattainable. Query: Question posed to a database. Quick: Opposite of the dead. Anything, therefore, that is not dead, is quick. QWERTY: Further proof that […]